Fryol is now integrated with Twitter to show up as a card summary in tweets. Took very little hacking to adapt Twitter meta tags to enable this and then get the domain approved at dev.twitter.com.
Moved to digitalocean.com
Moved this blog to digitalocean.com. To trace things back, fryol.net started with being hosted on Yahoo Small Business, moved to virpus and now to digitalocean.
The SSDs on digitalocean sold me. Another neat thing is that they have the latest releases of Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, openSUSE etc. Compared to virpus, this is huge, because even though virpus’ images are all about LTS/stable releases, they were a few releases behind . On a different note, Ubuntu LTS releases sound like pun to me: Life’s Too Short – what the hell are you doing clinging on to this release.
Cleartrip – Shady Refunds On A Public Complaint System
Update: This post here is the extreme of LOLz we’re talking about here. Doesn’t cleartrip get it that they have to stop using a public forum as a ticketing system?
It is extremely painful to see that one of the top railway booking sites in India has so many problems refunding people’s ticket money.
It’s really funny to see their forum which has people complaining about tickets not refunded, trains canceled, debit cards charged twice etc. We’re almost there into the third decade of Internet revolution, and does Cleartrip need a lesson on how to deal with a ticketed complaint system? Like come on guys, it shouldn’t be an open forum where I come and tell you my name, trip#, debit card# etc. Absolutely ridiculous.
After months of my trip booking+cancellation, I logged in today to re-check my accounts and voila; the money has still not reached my account. It should be a really easy problem to fix. As soon as you get a ticket cancellation, record it in a database which gets replicated to a backup. At the end of every 24 hours, select all transactions that were cancellations from that database and check if an accounts database has any record of money going back to customers. Additionally, if the railways or airlines are involved, join the query to check on another table that records transactions incoming from them. This is an absolutely no-brainer situation for the likes of a web company like this.
Instead, cleartrip relies on their forum for people to come, post and get refunds. Indeed, this makes perfect business sense. If people care, they’ll come, else why the hell should Cleartrip care going refunding money. India is all about numbers, a thousand may go, but a thousand shall come.
URL Shorteners
Was looking at all the URL shorteners out there in the world when I found out that there’s even a Firefox plugin that can let you do it with any service available. Here’s the list of services, and clicking around you can install the plugin somehow too I guess.
One very interesting service is this one: smfu.in. Looks nice, though it does the f***ing same thing.
This post also deserves a Raghuism (quote from Raghu – the quote being nearly in the same context):
Women are like good domains – the nice ones have already been taken, and to find the nice ones left, you have to go to a foreign location.
Quite a thought.
WordPress plugin madness – You don't need them!
I was trying to get the correct plugin installed to do “that” thing. For over 4 hours, I skipped and tested over 50 plugins in WP to get the favorite look done, but nothing helped. Something would not look right – or I’d have to compromise somewhere.
Common sense suddenly struck as I looked up phpdoc.wordpress.org, stitched together a Template file and used a few get_posts and setup_postdata calls to do exactly what I was looking for. Damn those cheeky plugins that redo the same thing over and again but not quite much!
Specifically, I wanted to list out all my posts in (by) a particular category on a page – although I also wanted an excerpt to be printed out for each post. None of the available plugins are able to do this cleanly. Some would say – go edit the php file. Well, if I wanted to do php, why would I use a plugin? And that’s when I thought – yeah, why do I need a plugin anyway. Thus ends my tryst with plugins. I’d use them lesser and lesser, until it’s about some integration with a third tool.